Since here we have one of the few forums, not utterly purged by self interested and mean censorship, I have thankfully come with my quiet marginal word (which the citizens of the world shall naturally not hear):

I've noticed the unfurling of a new wave of anti-historicism (which means the same as pro-positivism, although in its crypto and thus more obliterating form), we are truly in the eye of the annihilation of the human. But, what could be called a systematic forgetting, at the end of all things, is wandering closer with each day. We are at the more ragged end.

Is this not more odious evidence than can multiply us to see that we must at last take the burden of deconstruction into our method? Everything is expunged by the stupidity of the barbarian understanding, which leaves no breadth for the restoration of life.

As a depressing and perhaps mute footnote to the grand narrative of the media, I have posted this correction:

One can criticize anglos, but not jews. That is a
practical fact. (anti-)Semitic, however, does not refer to ‘jewish
thought,’ rather to the very genetic reading of technicity Heidegger
revolted against. Semitic means the same as the degrading of the jew
founded in scientific, or, biological, evidence. Today for no good
reason that is called ‘pseudo’ science (a symptom of the crypto-positivism which is now everywhere insidious). Yet on what basis? If there are
indeed races some must be more gifted than others. How can it not be
objectively so? Or are all individuals also ‘equal’ in any way other
than the socially useful myths of constitutions, which, it goes without
saying carry over not at all into the CV of the individual. This
‘anti-semitic’ business came along around the very end of the 19th
century. It of course replaced the older anti-jewish sentiment, which
had simply the meaning, not christian: thus misguided and blind.

The very inability to understand these statements is due to universal
forgetfulness of the possibility, even the possibility, of an
understanding other than the universal technological understanding
which, itself, was the view Heidegger found concerning.

To touch on the matter Heidegger was concerned with, one can point out
that Heisenberg, a German, had the same ‘Jewish’ view that Heidegger
found so ‘uncanny' in Wittgenstein. I.e., the view that only what is
measurable counts as certain and real. Suffice it to say that Heidegger
had a great regard for both men. There is little ‘racist’ in pointing
out that groups hold views in common, that is intrinsically obvious and
factually true. And, of course, it need not rely on genetics. In Hegel,
for instance, there is not even a competent understanding of genetics,
and there is no racial dimension to his thought, yet there is surely a
great division by civilization and group in regard to the evaluation of
the level and kind of thought prevalent among each group. It is
simply not thought as an essential or inborn trait, but a changeable one.

--

P.S.

One might ask why I have depended on the good kindness of the Plato forum for this, but I find that I am justified in the apposite character of this surprising case, so different, already so close to ourselves and our time, yet with ominous identity, it remains, so it seems to me, with the scrubbing of the Plato catalog.

How bitter is the opposition to truth? How sacred is the longing to keep with it? Now, however this thing must gather and be made to shine to a wider group. In so far as it will be made clear and demonstrated in the place of its laceration, where it is cut deep and bleeding in the shadows, a chasm is opening even in the current time, and in our sight.

I am in sympathy with your protest and affirmation of the real purpose of philosophy.

I make no claim to wholly grasp Heidegger, but I do have a clear sense of what he means by the technological age, and therefore the reduction of all 'knowledge' to the least grade of being and truth.

Having taught Heidegger to postgraduates this question of the Nazi connection comes up with nasty venom every now and then. For some reason these angry people cannot see the spite of their own moral stance, and how in the ancient world of Plato or the Middle Ages that spite would be plainly seen as lack of virtue. I specifically mean 'virtue' and not 'moral values' which embodies the rather hopeless ethics of our age.

But what can we do? I think all we can do is point to the highest. It is only with reference to the highest that any reform can take place in the general consciousness and being of civilization. Heidegger is himself a shining example here. His resoluteness on the question of being is really quite astonishing, and that is perhaps the single thing that distinguished him as a real philosopher in our time so barren of real philosophy.

I have recently been reading Cicero's On Duties and have been astonished how, by contrast, our age cannot join truth and ethics together, and least of all in political judgement. We have lost the ancient idea of society as discourse, as speech, and as mutual service for the common good in the detail of individual callings and vocations.

I keep asking myself where our moral emptiness comes from. And the answer that most makes sense is that we have allowed our thinking to become divorced from our human nature, our natural mode of being. Thought has become seduced by the sophistry of illusory explanations of the truth of things. As Louis Dupre has observed, from the 17th century onwards the quest for 'explanation' replaced the quest for 'truth', and thus is born, almost invisibly, the divorce between reason and virtue. And this is the ground of the secular society - a form of society inconceivable to Plato or Aristotle.

I feel we really need to understand the ground of modern thought on truth, and this is perhaps where Heidegger really does throw light. He managed to see much that had gone amiss, yet he did not get cross over it. He simply kept probing and shining a light where others had forgotten to look. This simple constancy places him above any political misjudgements he may have made (after all, it was the vast majority of the German population that voted Hitler to power), and certainly above any moral judgements mere journalist commentators may make. In the larger scheme of things their 'moral outrage' is of no consequence whatsoever. But how we meet the challenge of what we see is.

Sacrifice, morality, the citizen’s world, where is that? Where the peaks and the struggling spirits? Their demise is coincident with the surveying of all so-called cultures, thus begun around the time of Vico. Thus the relativization, deadly to life, which requires obsessive myopia. It is this leveling that begins the debate of Heidegger with Cassirer at Davos, and the end of all things, but only the end in theory, not in life. (How decisive this theoretical crisis will be is not yet known.)

I must admit, you raise, then, a necessary problem. In Heidegger there is a movement beyond Western European thinking, of the kind that is now everywhere from Karachi to Hangzhou, and has so, made every person to turn to Western European being, though they retain the outward trappings, robes, and prayers of this or that so-called culture. Everywhere there is technological being (except in that narrow racialist thought that is always found here and there in the margins). There can be no morally respectable being, no responsible being, but method, and therefore means, in every thought, outstrips ends.

Yet, only the narrowness of one culture, that finds every other culture barbaric, can we find the myopic weight of high causes, of aims that bring human beings to their height: this virtue, this specific virtue, of this specific culture. Thus the forbidden passion of every patriot, so to say. For, indeed, permissive liberality contemns all such thought as if with a hammer. Science means the same as neutral heterogeneity, thus apathy at a low boil.

Thus how can Heidegger make of being a new passion, a new life-giving cause? Here we have a decisive question.

Technology can not be thought as one more move in the interpretive flux of history, but as an absolute ground. The movement towards being is thus not this or that particular thought of the Beautiful, the True, the Good. We would have to make clear to ourselves that this virtue of Heidegger’s, brimming with nectar, in your shining and rowsing song, must not be found a virtue.

--

For the sake of shining light on the issue I mention this:

This same understanding is found today in sociology, its leading name is Foucault, at the highest level we have it in Derrida and Butler. At the same time, this historicist thought of the Germans is called as much a return to the Biblical Hebrew, in that language there was no word for ‘is’, understanding of being. These things being obscure for the moment, I only mention them in passing.

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